Most of us can never be completely satisfied with a work. Sure, you love your favorite movie, but you've seen it enough times that you've started to notice some of the inevitable technical errors, and they irk you. Or perhaps there's that one character that just gets on your nerves and seems to serve no purpose for the plot. Or maybe you watch the deleted scenes and wonder why they were removed.

In any case, this probably sounds familiar. Most people don't do anything about it because they don't know how, and if they did, well, it's an awful lot of work. This, on the other hand, is what happens when obsessions are fueled by motivation and skill. Fanedits are usually labors of love, whether their intention is to file down the rough edges on a beloved classic or to polish a diamond out of a rough.

Fanedits (especially film fanedits) are in a legal grey area when it comes to copyright. Sites dedicated to them warn that you shouldn't pick one up unless you own the original movie, which is a good rule of thumb, though it's highly unlikely that someone who doesn't own the film would even be looking at fanedits of it in the first place. There are sources to download them, but due to copyright paranoia, distribution methods are rarely user-friendly. Because of this, it's quite common for people to trade fanedits like concert bootlegs.

Examples

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Anime & Manga

The Neon Genesis Evangelion concurrency project is a fan edit that aims to splice Episodes 25 & 26 of the original series with The End of Evangelion in chronological order. Several versions of this edit exist on the web.

The Star Wars series are among the most fanedited movies. There are several good reasons for this: with a fanbase that big and obsessive, you're going to have a few people with the technical knowhow and bags full of ideas, and Star Wars is ripe for changes. The scope of Star Wars fanedits ranges far and wide.

Few will argue that adywan's Revisited Trilogy is the most ambitious fan-powered undertaking you're likely to find. A New Hope: Revisited was finished in 2008 after over 2 years of work, and the effort showed. Every single laser and saber was re-rotoscoped, the entire film was color-corrected from the 2004 DVDs (which looked like the film stock had been soaked in blue Kool-Aid), the entire soundtrack was remixed, irritating special-edition slapstick trimmed out as neatly as possible, hundreds of technical errors fixed, believable special effects and brand-new footage shot by the editor integrated, and most importantly, Han shot first. The editor even managed to make the saber duel between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader kinetic and engaging. He's been hard at work on The Empire Strikes Back: Revisited for some time now as well.

The Prequel Trilogy will also be revisited, and Adywan is hoping to make this trilogy "almost unrecognizable" with all of its new voice dubs and special effect edits.

"Purist" versions of the OT also exist, which are pretty much exactly like they were originally shown in the theaters (i.e., nothing to make them more consistent with the Prequels), plus remastered picture and sound quality.

One of the highest-profile fan edits in recent years is the recently released Despecialized Editions," a massive project by Harmy which, using multiple sources such as the Laserdisc, completely reconstructed the original and unaltered theatrical versions in HD for Blu-ray players.

War of the Stars. Editor The Man Behind the Mask set out to turn A New Hope into a grindhouse movie, and the results are hilarious. The less given away about this one, the better.

Topher Grace of all people created a fan edit of the prequel trilogy that cut it down to a single film. He has no intention of making it available for public viewing, but there were some articles written about what he included, and there have been a few copycat attempts by some fans, such as Turn to the Dark Side

The "Phantom Edit" is another high-profile fan-edit of the prequels. Edits of Episode I and Episode II are available, each including commentary tracks explaining the editor's choices.

There exists at least one edit of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier that recuts the film down to a 40-minute TV episode length, and others that simply excise the more infamously crappy moments.

The Man Behind the Mask also gave us Jaws: The Sharksploitation Edit. It was his first grindhouse edit and came before War of the Stars, and turned one of the greatest thrillers of all time into a B movie.

One brave soul on YouTube edited the original Planet of the Apes movie into a 24 minute episode of The Twilight Zone, which makes sense, since Rod Serling was one of the writers of the original film. Using original "Zone" background music, re-tinting the episode in greyscale, and adding opening and closing narration from two original "zone" episodes. It has been well received by many die-hard "Zone" fans, including Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, who has basically called it the 157th episode of the series. You can find the episode here http://theforbidden-zone.com/media/tzone.shtml

The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit is a fan cut of the three theatrical Peter Jackson-directed Hobbit films into one four-and-a-half-hour film. There are a couple of rough moments, such as cutting out the old-Bilbo intro and instead cold-opening on a subtitle that reads "60 year earlier..." (...than what, a first-time viewer could be forgiven for asking) and the transition from the first film to the second (in which the protagonists are fleeing from goblins which inexplicably disappear and are replaced by Beorn in bear form), but there was a lot of fat to be trimmed.

Live-Action Television

TV doesn't get the fanedit treatment quite as often as movies do, but it's not totally forgotten. Prison Break's first season was trimmed down into a 'movie' trilogy, its open ending tied off to offer closure.

There's a version of Knight Rider 2000 where Devon Miles isn't killed.

A fanedit exists of the Smallville series finale where there are no flash-forward at the end, Tess isn't killed, and Lex Luthor doesn't lose his memories.

Power Rangers has received some fanedit treatment, particulary where the infamous fan hoax "Scorpion Rain" is concerned, with several attempts at making the "episode" resulting in ten minute, twenty-five, and even forty-five minute attempts. Most recently, the much reviled output of the Johnathan Tzachor helmed "Neo Saban" seasons have encouraged various fan remixes and edits

Doctor Who superfan "Whoflix" has committed himself to editing as much of the classic and current series as possible.

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